Why Your Business Cant Ignore the Importance of Providing a Positive User Experience (UX)
Does your site provide the best user experience?
Bad website usability is not only bad for your users; its bad for your business too.
What exactly is website usability? Its definitely one of those industry jargon terms that many entrepreneurs and business owners might not be familiar with. But should! Website usability means: how easy is it to use your website?
If youre unsure of what that is, then chances are you may need some help building a strategy for your website.
Your websites use is how well it accomplishes the reason you built it. Is it to generate leads? Get someone to make a purchase? Direct people to something else? Each page of your website needs a purpose and if that purpose isnt clear, then the usability is diminished.
When web marketers look at usability theyre looking to see whether or not a user can complete a defined task with little to no confusion or frustration.
So how do you know if your customers are finding your website easy to use?
Measuring User Experience and Usability
There are many services that have come and gone when it comes to measuring user activity and a sites usability.
Heatmap services such as Hotjar or Crazyegg have been semi successful though woefully abused in the hands of those who dont know what to do with the information. These types of services give the website owner a birds-eye view at where their website visitors are focusing their attention.
Testing groups can be a great asset but at the same time these are closed, controlled groups so they often inadvertently present misinformation by way of not being an accurate representation of the sites actual target market.
The best way to check your websites usability is your Google Analytics. Google offers its analytic web-based software for free for many reasons. One is so you can make your website better.
Within Google Analytics site owners can check things like how long someone is on a page, where they entered the page from, what they did on the page, and when they left.
If someone lands on your page and leaves nearly right away you have what is called a Bounce. If the majority of your users are bouncing (called a high bounce rate) then you have a usability issue and are offering up a bad user experience where they have left too quickly to take any action.
Another way to check is to set a conversion measurement. This is when you input information into Google Analytics that triggers a signal when someone completes a task as defined in there. You can even assign monetary values to the conversion if you want to measure the revenue generated through the conversion.
This type of analysis is best left to professionals so get in touch with my team if you need any help.
But Google doesnt stop there with its free offerings! Try checking things like your sites speed or mobile usability using these free tools: